Complexity and international relations

Almost the whole international relations field did not anticipate successfully the end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell and the collapse of the Soviet Union happened within a few months. The failure to predict this huge development does make people disappointed, but does this mean these theories are useless? In this essay, I will examine this core question after assessing the book by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Does this book have any relation to the international politics? Does this story offer a new view to the studies of international affairs?

At the beginning, I did not understand the reason why we should read Complexity. On the surface, it deals with a man and his intellectual interaction with other friends. The first few chapters truly confused me because I thought there was nothing to do with the world politics. The economist Brian Arthur discovered the Santa Fe Institute’s new way to simulate the economic development. However, as I continued to read, I think there is some common ground between international relations and the story. The international theories have always been attacked to be pseudo-science although international relations are under the discipline of political “science”. If we view international relations as a science, international relations then should behave like a science discipline. This means that international relation theories should have the capacity to explain the past and predict the future because a mathematic principle or a physics equation can include the general phenomenon and can be tested again and again. If this is the way that we view international relations theories, the theories of international relations such as the realism and the liberalism should have successfully predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, this accurate anticipation did not happen! Does it mean that international relations theories failed us? Does this failure make these theories lose their credibility?

I am very interested in the point of bounded rationality that the Santa Fe approach makes. ‘Here was this elusive “Santa Fe approach”…the Santa Fe team would emphasize increasing returns, bounded rationality, and the dynamics of evolution and learning.’ Realists suppose that every nation state is rational. The decision maker of a state makes an analysis of this contingency. He knows all the factors that would influence the event, and he enlists the possibilities. According to the best possible outcome, the decision maker would choose a policy or a reaction. Every actor in the international system interacts in a way that is predictable because we assume that the actors know every opponent’s national interests and its next step. However, this kind of perfect rationality does not occur in the real world. There is a gap between the theory and the practice. The decision makers don’t know whether the enlisted opportunities are all the choices that they can have. They are not capable of telling which choice would lead to the best results because in real world it’s hard to define the other countries’ national interests and reaction. In short, the nation-state decision unit does not have the perfect rationality but the bounded rationality. If scholars keep presuming the actors have the objective rationality, the development may often surprise people and people would be disappointed. The end of the Cold War is unanticipated, but it does not mean that the realism is useless or incredible. Hence, I am not angry at the fact that we missed a dramatic change in international politics. In Complexity, the author mentioned the classic economic theory thinks in terms of perfect rationality. However, what will happen if agents are put in an unstable environment? We need to acknowledge the difference between theory and practice. The system is static in theory, but the real world is dynamic and constantly changing.

Moreover, there is another remarkable point in the book. They found out the V-pattern of a flock of birds is always formed because three simple rules are written into the computer simulation program. How to explain the very bird’s behavior after hitting a pole becomes an issue. Is its behavior emergent? “I couldn’t see how you could define ‘truly’ emergent behavior. In some sense, everything that happens in the universe, including life itself, is already built into the rules that govern the behavior of quarks. So what is emergence, anyway? And how do you recognize it when you see it? That goes to the heart of the problem in artificial life.” (Complexity, Page 242) Emergence refers to the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. When the scholars wrote the three rules into the computer, they did not know that a single bird would react in this unpredictable way. Hence, I understand that emergent behavior is something unexpected because the rules are simple but the system is dynamic and self-evolving.

As in economics, we assume that every agent is rational, and this assumption could facilitate the calculation and simplify the situation. In international relations, theories are based on several simple rules and sometimes we simplify the world in order to better understand the instance. If we use the realism to examine these events, we might miss the chance to foresee it. In constructivism, the WWI and the collapse of the Soviet Union can be better understood because scholars look into the individual decision maker and the perception-reaction pattern. The end of the Cold War is hard to predict and this event is an emergent behavior because it’s not written in the rules. The reason why an emergent property is hard to foresee is that the number of interactions between components of a system increases combinatorially with the number of components. I think that the globalization allows the nation-state to inetract more easily. Nonetheless, it also becomes a force itself and pushes the governments to cooperate or change their conducts. International organizations play a vital role too. The international organizations provide the states a forum to negotiate, to talk and to get the feedback with a shorter time span. The interaction and the feedback are all motors for the emergent behavior to occur. Hence, these non-state forces might help to push the Berlin Wall down.

Thinking outside of the box is a very good point. As Brian Arthur was assigned to be the director of the economic program in Santa Fe Institute, he said that he had two quick decisions to make. One is the way to recruit scholars to the team. “He needed people who were open-minded and sympathetic to the Santa Fe themes, of course.” (Page 246) He borrowed the scholars from other disciplines to study economics, which surprised me. Many theories of international relations have been borrowed from other disciplines, such as constructivism and feminism from sociology. I have always thought that economics theory does not borrow from the other fields although we do a lot of quantifications nowadays. After reading his approach of simulating the actions of the agents, I suddenly have a thought on the world politics. The neo-realists think of the nation-states as the balls on the pool. It’s similar to think the economies as the agents. If we can do the same computer simulation as the Santa Fe scholars did for the economy under glass, can we predict all the rise and fall of hegemony?

Although the scholars in international relations failed to foresee the coming of the end of the Cold War, theories of international affairs still have their credibility. In my opinion, we cannot deny the utility of the classical view only due to one failure. The only thing is to recognize that there is a gap between the theory and the practice. Then the scholars could find a way to bridge this gap and make the theory more complete. As the times change, the theories of world politics should adapt themselves to the new era. Theories could evolve along the times. The scholars could strengthen the scientific base of these theories, and this might lead to a better standpoint to predict the future development of the real world international relations.